I don’t pretend to know how to evaluate the COVID-19 projections provided by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, but it seems reasonably legitimate (affiliated with the University of Washington and Gates Foundation), and it seems to acknowledge a lot of room for error. For Indiana, it projects a peak on April 14 with a need on that date for 10,458 beds; 1,582 ICU beds; and 854 ventilators. Right now, we’d be short 1,973 beds and 706 ICU beds. (The 706 ICU beds represents a 44% shortage!) It projects 110 deaths per day in Indiana at that point. Projected out to August 4, we’d be looking at 2,440 deaths in the state total.
I’m not sure if you can do a simple pro rata calculation to see what it will look like locally, but figuring Tippecanoe County as 190,000 of Indiana’s 6.7 million, that would be about 2.8% of the total. If that’s correct, on April 14, we’ll need 293 hospital beds, 44 ICU beds, and 24 ventilators, and we’ll experience 3 deaths. Through August 4, our share of the total deaths would be 68.
For my part, we’ve got our office mostly working remotely. I’ve commandeered the basement storage room and am incredibly comfortable churning out legal work from the bowels of my house. I think the kids are hanging in there, though this amount of screen time probably isn’t the best thing in the world. We’ve made them come along for family dog walks which has actually been quite nice for me. They’re funny kids! Amy has worked from home for years. Having us around probably cramps her style a little bit, but all-in-all we’re incredibly fortunate compared to what many others are going through.
Nothing to do but keep grinding through this – keep kicking at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight.
(Updated March 31, 2020: Maybe our efforts are having an effect, maybe the model changed for other reasons, but as of March 31, 2020, the model is showing peak resource use on April 18, 2020. The need has been lowered to 3,024 beds (8,485 available), 460 ICU beds (706 available), and 30 deaths on that date. Projected out to August 4, 2020, it shows 906 deaths. That’s a substantial improvement.)
Bill Gates was on CNN and he was of the opinion that the only way we can defeat this virus is to have every state to be on the same page. Then my son tells me the governor of Mississippi said he will not do a state wide lock down because the people of Mississippi don’t want one . Throw in the governor of Florida who is fine with the north part of the state being opened since there wasn’t as many infections in that part of the state.. From a local bent my wife saw about 16 teenagers playing soccer this afternoon. Total and utter insanity! This virus isn’t going away any time soon unless we can come up with a miracle cure.
The thing I truly enjoyed about the Gates interview (it was about 10 minutes long) and every time Trump was mentioned he would get this grin on his face.You could tell he wanted to blast Trump but being in the position he’s in he couldn’t do it.
The governor of Florida finally issued a stay at home order,but he exempted places off worship. Clipton (James Donald), the army doctor in the ‘The Bridge on the River Kwaii’ utters the last three words in the movie “Madness! Madness … madness!” .That really sums it up. Sad truly sad…